The Turning Game
by Holly go lightly1
Summary: When a surly stagehand takes Bouqet's place as the Set Manager after his very conveinient death, she goes about in unshrouding this Ghost that is so benevolent to her and the unfathomably dim Daae, the singer she loathes.
1. Prologue *or* Meet the Sweet Mlle. Juan

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Disclaimer: I only own Kasinna Juan. Everything else belongs to Gaston Leroux.

Princess Aurora reclined demurely within the womb of her aromatic cradle, adorned with lilac gossamers and webbed in rose thorns and buds to ward of they who come. Around her, sweet pucks and forlorn pixies made their rounds, kissing her alabaster temples and using their sweeter breath and hands to pacify the troubled tempest within her silken feet.

Her room? Homage to Demeter! Shocks of gold abound upon the amber facades surrounding her tiny little trundle, veils of carnation hue shielded her reluctant lids from stringent day. Sprigs of willow and lily and honeysuckle were vigilant sentinels at the corners of the room.

All still.

All protecting their sweet Aurora.

While not too far away, the princess's foil lurked in contempt.

Her name was Kasinna, but that was no matter. From birth, she and Gaea had conversed and settled upon something: names were meant for princesses, ones who deserved to be glorified by the day. Kasinna, in all of her accentuated features, was a stork, nothing else. Vacant, listless honey eyes; farcically elongated nose; lips as featureless as a pair of tongs. Long limbs that were neither plump and decent like a duchess's nor lithe and sleek like a ballerina. Useless. The height of a man, the build, the will. Yet, sadly, not the physical traits. Her eyes and convictions lay in shadow, just as she did at the moment, because of her skirts. 

Marvelous.

And not more than three paces from Aurora's cradle was a realm of Hades, Kasinna's working chambers by night. Where swaggering men clambered raucously up and down ladders to musty curtain rigging, their jugs of claret and coarse booze littering her repulsed toes. Where a man by the name of Joseph Bouquet roared at her, pitched her down trapdoors, and never failed to remind her that as a woman (especially as a stagehand), she was a dreg. Where rosin scattered like the authentic dust of a road. Where garish girls in gaudy garb and glitz zipped by her, jeering at her masculine boots and countenance.

How she hated them.

As she hated Aurora.

As she hated the theater.

For when every other seventeen year-old lass watching Prince Charming emancipate Princess Aurora from the tomb of her own eyelids fluttered their own in yearning, she turned a cold eye.

There were no princesses. 

An hour ago, "Princess Aurora" had been spotted screeching in the streets, clamoring for a bobby to arrest her abusive beaux.

As "Prince Charming" had been seen boozing up with his chums and cock fighting in the cellars.

Kasinna mopped the ruddy tip of her swooping nose, eyes wandering towards the irregular length of her feet. She flexed them. Were they only smaller, more slender, perhaps she might be Princess Aurora, if not only for two acts. 

But sadly....

She flinched at the resounding ovation before the stage...and the booze bottle than shattered and nipped at her ear.

"Juan, damn you!" Bouquet barked, his eyes listless with the contents. "Close the bloody curtain! Close it!"

"Go to Satan's lap, Joseph!" she retorted, catching her fingers on the wiry cables, her thumb bleeding bitterly before she caught it in her mouth and nursed it. 

And Princess Aurora and her lovely Prince lived happily ever after.

Wherever that was. 


	2. Chapter One: Bouquet's Death

*I've been working on this plot for...hmm....four years. Hah. Isn't that pathetic? Anyhow, your reviews are/will be appreciated.

*Firstly, I'd like to say one thing: I hate Christine Daae with all the flames of Hades. She's a fat little trollop. So there. And everybody knows it.

*Forgive me if everything isn't chronologically correct. I'm staying true to the original book, rather than the play or Susan Kay's version (which is astoundingly brilliant).

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**__**

The Parisian Pedestrian

By: Sir Claude Claret

Ah, the Opera. Nothing finer to a young (or old) man's ears like the lifting trills of a soprano. The works of the Opera House emancipate a man from the tedious throbbing of the machines he manipulates by day. And with the gala merely a C-scale a way, it is most certain that all of Paris is as flustered and eager as this young chap here at his desk.......

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"...And when you're finished lifting those crates," Bouquet slurred brutally, "maybe you'll toddle your dim little self upstairs and fix me my goddamn coffee, eh?"

Kasinna looked incredulously and censoriously at Bouquet, who was reclining in the fashion of a righteous monarch atop one such crate, his swollen abdomen freely drooping over his thigh-thick belt strapped about his (or lack of definite) waist. Like the mongrel he was, he used his soiled fingernails to freely scrape at his wiry, steel-wool-like whiskers, watching with absent concentration as flurries of his parched chin floated off his beard in the process.

"Since when have you been expecting?" she jeered, swatting his gut with her cap as she stalked by, his grunt of resentment making her flinch. 

Taking leisurely intermissions to lace and relace her boots before she found the jumbled assembly of crates no more than three doors away, something became rather evident to her. "Silly goat," she burbled, slumping out of the room once more and pacing the three doors down to reach where Bouquet had been. "He didn't express which crates were to be moved, they come in two colors. Oi, Joseph, did you----?"

Her boots grazed a rather hefty sand bag in her course. She emitted an exasperated little wheeze. "Damn stage boys, tell 'em to pick something up and they let it roll off like water, well they can bloody sod themselves." Her fingers groped in the faint lamplight of the quarters behind the scarlet curtains. The calloused fingertips strained to touch the irregular texture of the sandbags...but felt something of a more supple nature. She then, with great concern, lay her entire palm upon the bag and rumpled it.

Oh dear.

"A corpse," she muttered, her monotone voice proclaimed with a slight tremor. She then produced a rueful, gasping little chuckle. "Joseph, you poor scalawag."

Hollow with astonishment, she resumed his seat upon the crate he'd occupied only a few breaths ago, withdrew a slender cigarette from a pouch in her sweeping olive coat, and lit it with a tiny splinter of a match. In its amber glow, she observed Joseph's corpse only long enough to warm the nub of her cigarette before she took a robust drag of it. The fingers of smoke she exhaled caressed his ruptured neck and glassy eyes and in the pitch silence, she dimly mulled over the occurrence, reiterating the same words over and over till her voice parched:

"You poor scalawag." 

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"Well, Mlle. Juan, you mustn't loathe our wariness, and neither can you blame it, can you?"

"No." An extended draw of the cigarette. "I highly revere it, contrary to your beliefs. It be foolish to not act in such a manner, please proceed, inspector."

The inspector tilted his unfashionably gargantuan spectacles at the only other occupant and witness in the room (Kasinna Juan) and found himself cynical of the nonchalant air with which she was accepting the charges of murder against her. This stork-like creature in the three-quarter length olive coat who was smoothly puffing on her cigarette.

"You say Joseph Bouquet was your employer?"

"Mm, no. The Opera managers are my employers, monsieur. He was merely the manager of the stagehands. I was his...well, it was somewhat of a second in command, but most of the time it felt like a smart swat in the backside."

"Then you did not like M. Bouquet?" inquired Inspector Eauvein, piqued and anxious to think he'd found a vein of common sense.

"It wasn't a matter of liking or not liking, it was a business relationship, you understand." She clasped her jaws together and let the smoke waft between the spaces between her teeth, almost mockingly. "Sorry to make you think you'd stumbled upon a motive."

"Was M. Bouquet liked on the whole?"

"Tolerated."

Eauvein's eyebrows grazed his broadening forehead as the woman extended one leg and observed with childish interest the mucked sole of her boot. She caught his eyes and held them with her own.

"But not liked. Bit of a boozer, honestly. Drank. Not a pretty mouth, either, as long as I'm not being discrete. But a hard-worker." She guffawed ruefully. "But an astounding boozer. If he hadn't been strangled by some rope device, I'd think he'd kill himself, bit of a dunce he was."

Eauvein made a tidy scrawled note of this.

"Erm, Inspector?"

Eauvein's lashes fluttered and his glance returned to hers. Hers was now a trifle timorous.

"Are my managers pressing charges?"

"Eh? Oh, hardly, Mlle. They're not. They're rushing to your defense, in fact."

Kasinna looked highly captivated and incredulous. "What are they saying?"

"That some ghost has caused the end to M. Bouquet, and not you."

"I beg your pardon, a ghost?"

"Well, is it not common talk amongst you folk of a ghost in the Opera?"

"Must not be my folk."

"Then you----"

"Inspector, as long as I'm not going to be incarcerated, I'll believe them when they inform me a harpy guards the privy."

Eauvein produced a tight grin.

"But tell me," the girl continued. "What's to keep the press from believing that I, not some ghost, caused the end of Bouquet? Were I anyone else, I'd convict myself."

"Paparazzi, my dear. For the gala, I surmise." Another tight grin. "And Parisian romance."

Kasinna did not return the smile; rather, she lit another cigarette.

******

*WARNING: SMOKING CAUSES DAMAGE TO THE LUNGS, BRAIN, ETC. DO NOT SMOKE! DO NOT SMOKE! KASINNA WILL BE QUITTING IN THE DURATION OF THE STORY! EVERYONE HAS TERRIBLE LUNGS IN THIS STORY!! DO NOT SMOKE! IF YOU DO, YOU'LL END UP EATING/BREATHING THROUGH A TUBE! 


End file.
